We Have No Idea: A Guide to the Unknown Universe

Many books explain what we know about the universe. This one, from the hugely popular PhD Comics (50 million readers since 2008), tackles all the weird stuff we haven't figured out yet. In our small corner of the universe, we know how some matter behaves most of the time and what even less of it looks like, and we have some good guesses about where it all came from. But we really have no clue what's going on.

Off to Be the Wizard

It's a simple story. Boy finds proof that reality is a computer program. Boy uses program to manipulate time and space. Boy gets in trouble. Boy flees back in time to Medieval England to live as a wizard while he tries to think of a way to fix things. Boy gets in more trouble. Oh, and boy meets girl at some point.

Quantum: A Guide for the Perplexed

From Schrodinger's cat to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, this book untangles the weirdness of the quantum world. Quantum mechanics underpins modern science and provides us with a blueprint for reality itself. And yet it has been said that if you're not shocked by it, you don't understand it. But is quantum physics really so unknowable? Is reality really so strange? And just how can cats be half alive and half dead at the same time?

We Are Legion (We Are Bob): Bobiverse, Book 1

Bob Johansson has just sold his software company and is looking forward to a life of leisure. There are places to go, books to read, and movies to watch. So it's a little unfair when he gets himself killed crossing the street. Bob wakes up a century later to find that corpsicles have been declared to be without rights, and he is now the property of the state. He has been uploaded into computer hardware and is slated to be the controlling AI in an interstellar probe looking for habitable planets.

The Power

'She throws her head back and pushes her chest forward and lets go a huge blast right into the centre of his body. The rivulets and streams of red scarring run across his chest and up around his throat. She'd put her hand on his heart and stopped him dead.' Suddenly - tomorrow or the day after - girls find that with a flick of their fingers, they can inflict agonizing pain and even death.

Super Powereds: Year 1: Super Powereds, Book 1

Knowledge is power. That would be the motto of Lander University, had it not been snatched up and used to death by others long before the school was founded. For while Lander offers a full range of courses to nearly all students, it also offers a small number of specialty classes to a very select few. Lander is home to the Hero Certification Program, a curriculum designed to develop students with superhuman capabilities, commonly known as Supers, into official Heroes.

Emily Newman says:"Brilliant Story"

Publisher's Summary

Science is always telling stories. Whether in the creation myths of evolution or the Big Bang, or in the eureka moments of science history, narrative just as much as metaphor is a key tool in the scientist's surprisingly literary toolkit.

Perhaps the most interesting use of story is the thought experiment, the intuition pump, that draws on the most instinctive parts of the imagination to crack otherwise perplexing problems. From Newton's Bucket to Maxwell's Demon, from Einstein's Lift to Schrodinger's Cat, all are examples of 'fiction' being used at the highest level, not just to explain, but to deduce, to prove.

In this unique anthology, authors have collaborated with leading scientists, to bounce literary, human narratives against purely theoretical ones, alloying together real stories with abstract ones, to produce truly extraordinary results.

Short story collections can often be uneven, and in some ways this was a really high variance one. Short stories also tend to throw me off sometimes because with each new story there is a different set of characters and universe to be imagined, and this collection was way too wide for me to keep pace.

I did like a couple of the actual stories, but what,i truly enjoyed were the afterwords. I was familiar with some of the science but a fair bit of this was new to me.

I would recommend this to any science enthusiast but warn that I found it a long read mainly due to constantly shifting focus

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